Google’s New SEO & Site Speed Tool

Google recently launched a new SEO and site speed tool web.dev (although it’s still in Beta). As it is from Google we might expect this to be of more value than other existing tools, and its design certainly gives that appearance, it looks great.

We ran our site through the tool, and it gave us these results;

It’s clear we need to improve our site’s speed and accessibility (we’re working on it), and we’re pretty chuffed to receive 100/100 on SEO, however there are some important points to note with the tool;

SEO here is solely focusing on making sites more crawl-able for search engine bots, rather than what will directly improve rankings.

Site speed suggestions are not always applicable e.g. “eliminate render-blocking resources”. If we were to move all the javascript code to the footer to do this, we’d lose the animations.

Given this, and as with all automated SEO audit tools (Moz and Ahrefs included), 100% on all scores won’t be achievable or even necessarily right for each site. They’re all still better with human review to determine priorities, this will lead to more efficient SEO.

That’s not to say Google’s tool doesn’t provide additional value, there are a lot more outputs in its reports especially around accessibility and forward-thinking performance measurements e.g. using next-gen image formats.

Overall, it’s a great addition to any SEO’s toolbox, however, for now existing SEO audit tools and manual review are still more important for improving performance.